The Long Green Shore Read Online Free PDF Page B

breathing and occasional snores. Curly Thomas, in the next bunk, had come up after Regan was asleep and turned the nozzle of the air vent over onto his bunk.
    So Curly slept in the comparative comfort of the cool stream of air sucked down from the deck, while Regan sweated and tossed with bad dreams.
    Bishie was threading his way through the sleeping tangle of the hold to fill his water bottle at the one tap, located over near the latrines.
    The Laird was lying back, half asleep, his hands clasped behind his head, half listening to Dick the Barber.
    â€˜You know,’ Dick was saying, ‘a funny thing happened to a mate of mine once—a little bloke by the name of Spade Burns—you might know him if you worked out west any time.’
    Deacon was falling—a slow, sickening fall into darkness—and there was a sudden shock as he threw himself back from the edge of the pit and jerked awake.
    He was slouched over on his side and the pencil had fallen from his slackened fingers onto the pad. He looked at the sheet—his number, rank and name were on the top of the page, then: ‘Beloved Margaret’. The rest of the page was a blank.
    â€˜Ah, hell,’ he yawned. ‘I’ll finish her tomorrow when we get in.’
    He put the pad and pencil under his lifebelt pillow and turned over heavily and uncomfortably to sleep. He could hear Dick the Barber’s voice down the alley, and a grunted comment from the Laird.
    Cairo Fleming put his toothbrush and paste back in the toilet holdall and slipped it back into his haversack. He kicked off his unlaced boots and climbed into the bunk.
    â€˜Night, Cairo,’ said the Log drowsily from the next bunk.
    Cairo closed his eyes. ‘Night, mate,’ he said.
    Lieutenant-Colonel Connell poured the last of the whisky.
    â€˜Sluts,’ he said. ‘They’re all sluts and she was as bad as any of them. I was glad to get away from her…’
    Doc Maguire looked steadily at him with that same blank derision and made no comment.
    Pez and Janos were bedded down in the shelter of a tarpaulin under the forward gun platform in the ship’s smell of pitch and hemp. The sharp edge of the wind flicked at them and when the ship rolled it buffeted their shelter, whip-cracking the loose ends of the tarpaulin.
    But they were wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets—their own and some they had borrowed from the sweating sleepers in the hold—and had draped their ground sheets so the water would drain off down through the ropes and not collect underneath them.
    They lay silent, rocked in the vast plunge of the ship, and heard the wind howling through the rigging. There is no sound like it on earth—the wind howling on the vast bowstrings of the mast and stays.
    â€˜We’re riding out of the rain,’ said Pez.
    You could see the sky ahead was broken and a stormy moon was tossing in a streaming sky.
    â€˜Port tomorrow,’ said Pez.
    â€˜Yeah,’ said Janos: ‘If the old tub holds together that long.’
    Captain Dyall Jones, Master of the City of Benong , patted the worn rail of the bridge as a rider pats the foaming neck of his horse after a hard run.
    They were a pair, he thought, the ship and he. But for the brutal grace of war, both of them lay in Wreckers’ Row.
    Chicken farms in Surrey are a dream of the open sea, but when the fowls scratch under your window you dream of the sea again. Chicken farms and a war a-blowing?
    He remembered getting out the good black suit and brushing it down—the smell of solid serge and mothballs. The trip to London—the polite disinterest of the Admiralty and the suggestion that this might be a younger man’s war. The days and weeks spent sitting on hard wooden benches outside snugly closed office doors. A quiet, solid, stubbornly persistent figure in brushed black, twisting the hard-brimmed hat in his stubborn, ship-wise fingers.
    Finally they got tired of his